This was clearly to be a circus, the likes of which the town of Ilkley had never seen. And she felt like one of the performers. She and John hadn’t had sex in about two months, and now, when one stayed over with the other, since they had never actually gotten a place together, they lay on opposite sides of the bed, sheets tucked primly under their arms, concentrating on their novels, and when the lights went out they fell asleep without touching at all, bar a dry, sad little kiss. It was like if either of them opened their mouth, all this stuff would come out. They talked about it—joked weakly about how tired they both were, idly wondered about a weekend away at some point in the future, but they were lying.
Jennifer had had an hour to kill earlier while John and the others
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took part in the “rehearsal.” They were staying in a nice, country hotel neither of them could really afford, but it had been the cheapest place on the list that came with the invitation. It was chintzy and frilly, and she swore the matronly woman who registered them at the desk sniffed when she saw that they weren’t married, but it had a beautiful view of open countryside.
She used the time to take a run. She’d started running a year or so earlier and discovered—much like bacon sandwiches, which she had taken to eating in secret at about the same time—that she loved it. It made her feel powerful and free. Head down, headphones on, she ran hard for half an hour trying not to think about John, and what the hell she was doing here, at this wedding of people she didn’t know and didn’t care about, with a man she was no longer in love with, losing herself in the song lyrics on her CD Walkman and the stunning scenery.
She met Stephen at the rehearsal dinner, to which she did wear black, having compromised and bought an entirely suitable coat dress and shift in an utterly appropriate soft green for the next day. He was an usher from the university years, evidently, although he was English—
they’d met doing an internship at a bank in London three summers earlier. John was sat at the other end of the table, next to the blond bridesmaid he would accompany down the aisle the next day. He looked miserable. Which was actually, she realized, his normal face. Which was, actually, she then realized, why he was so . . . exhausting to live with.
They all stood obediently behind their marked places, waiting for the main bridal party to take their seats.
“You look great with your clothes on.”
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and a narrow waist. Not at all her normal type, he looked uncomplicated and too healthy, with bright eyes and slightly ruddy cheeks. Typical jock.
“What?”
“I mean to say, you scrub up well, if you’ll excuse the phrase.”
She still had no idea of what he meant.
“How could any woman in her right mind possibly excuse that phrase?”
He shrugged nonchalantly and beamed at her.
“Have we met?” She felt bored already.
“Not exactly. I was watching you, this afternoon, running.”
“Right.” That explained the appalling opening gambit, from which, she felt, the chances of recovery were bleak.
She looked pointedly at the place name of the man on her right, hoping that this idiot would leave her alone, but of course she didn’t know him, either, and he was already talking animatedly to the woman next to him. She was stranded.
The tall blond held out his hand and smiled, and this time it was sheepish.
“Stephen. Sorry. I’m not a dickhead, I promise.”
She shrugged and smiled weakly. This could be a long night.
Only it turned out, he wasn’t a dickhead. And it wasn’t a long night.
He was funny, and far cleverer than his earlier remarks had made him seem. And incredibly straightforward. He was a stockbroker, but he didn’t want to do that forever. He wanted to work for himself. He lived in London, alone, in a flat he’d bought a couple of years ago and done up in the evenings and at weekends. He had a lot of mates, played rugby at the weekends, as she had suspected, but had no girlfriend, at least not one permanent enough or important enough to bring to this wedding.
“So how come you’re here, Jennifer?”
“My . . . my boyfriend, John. He’s the guy over there, at the end of the table. He was at school with Peter.”
Stephen glanced briefly at John, who didn’t notice that he was being
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discussed, and nodded. She thought she saw incredulity cross his face.
“How long you two been together?”
“Forever.” Or did she mean too long?
“How long is forever?” His eyes were laughing at her. “You’re not much into straight answers, are you?”
“We met at university. First week, first term. That sort of thing.” She pulled a face, and he raised an eyebrow.
“Ah,” he nodded sagely, “one of those couples.”
She laughed, indignant denial seeming suddenly pointless. “Afraid so. Do you have to make it sound quite so ghastly?”
“But it is ghastly. Think of all the things you missed. . . .”
She fell silent and stared intently at her fingers, entwined in front of her on the table.
“So that would make it . . . how many years?”
He was like a dog with a bone.
“Well, I was eighteen, and I’m twenty-seven, so I guess nine years.”
“And you’re not married.”
“Not married, no.” She waved her ringless left hand nervously in front of her face.
“Why not?”
No one had asked her that before. People joked about it. Mum danced around the subject, at family gatherings when she’d had a couple of glasses of wine. And Hannah made no secret of her burning desire to be a bridesmaid, for anyone at all who might ask her. But no one had just come out and asked her. And here was this stranger, looking right at her, asking her straight-out.
Jennifer looked at her hands, folded in her lap. When she answered, she was almost surprised to hear the words come quietly from her mouth.
“We don’t love each other anymore.”
So this would be the point at which he’d cough, embarrassed, and change the subject. Invent the need to visit the bathroom, or the bar.
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She looked up, and he was staring at her intently.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” But he didn’t look all that sorry.
The next morning she slipped into a pew near the back of the church. The elderly couple next to her nodded and smiled politely, and then they all listened to the organist. She’d wondered how she would feel about watching John come down the aisle with a woman who wasn’t her. Turned out, she felt sorry for him. He looked awkward and uncomfortable, and the pair of them couldn’t get their walk right, so it almost looked like he was being dragged up the aisle by a twelve-stone puff of burgundy taffeta. No irony here, then, she almost smiled. He smiled weakly at her as he passed. Stephen was two ushers behind him.
They should have given him the hippo bridesmaid. He looked confident and amused, and, she was surprised to realize, a bit handsome. She saw him scan the aisles—for her? When he spotted her, he fixed her with a broad smile. She felt a ridiculous rush of warmth in the pit of her stomach. What the hell was going on?
She could see the back of John’s head. His wedding haircut was too short, and his neck was red. For the first time, she really listened to the vicar, to the words of the marriage service. They were profound and serious. It seemed to her, sitting in the back of a church full of strangers, watching two people she neither knew nor cared for take lifelong vows, that the priest was talking directly to her. Except that he wasn’t a priest anymore, he was a scientist, this his lab, and his words the litmus test of her feelings for John. The evidence was inescapable. Each vow forced from her heart a resounding no. By the time the groom got to kissing the bride, Jennifer’s relationship was as dead as the wedding couple’s was born again, and when her eyes filled with tears watching them pass her, triumphant, on the way to be photographed in the churchyard, not one person, save maybe John, knew what those tears meant.
After that, of course, the day was an agony without end. John and the other ushers held the prone bride in their arms for photographs,
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stood on the endless receiving line, sat at high table for the interminable schmaltzy speeches, waltzed bridesmaids around the floor to the strains of Celine Dion, and grew quietly and determinedly drunker. She saw Stephen up close just once more before she made her escape. She was waiting, by the door, for John, who’d returned to the fray for one more good-bye, or thank you, or something. She was shifting from aching foot to aching foot, and her back was to the room. She knew that he was behind her, before he spoke.
“Are you okay?”
She didn’t look at him.
“Not remotely.”
He touched her arm lightly, but for long enough to make her turn and meet his gaze.
“You will be, Jennifer. You will be.”
It was three months after that before she talked to him again. He called her at work one Friday morning. Though it had been weeks, and though it wasn’t a voice she knew well, she recognized his voice at once.
Which was strange, since she didn’t think she’d given him a single thought—well, not many—since that miserable day. And, actually, exciting.
“You’re not easy to get a number for, d’you know?”
She laughed. “I can’t begin to imagine how you went about it?”
“Means fair and foul.”
“Is that why it took so long?!”
“Nope. I’ve had it for a few weeks. Couple of months, in fact.”
“Taken this long to work up the courage?”
She was flirting. She didn’t even know that she knew how.
“Bah! You wish. You weren’t that frosty.”
“And I was trying so hard. . . .”
“Can’t fool me.” She felt then, listening to his voice at the end of the line, that maybe she couldn’t.
“Why so tardy, then?”
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“Wanted to give you time. . . .”
“To forget you entirely?”
“No . . . to get out of your . . . situation.”
She left the line quiet.
“And you have, I hope?”
She had. Almost as soon as their return from Yorkshire. Not because of Stephen—that would have been ridiculous, on the strength of two short conversations. And Jennifer was never ridiculous. Because it was the right thing to do, and because that had suddenly become clear to her, sitting in that church, and because once she’d made up her mind to do it, she couldn’t wait.
It had been weirdly easy to extricate him from her life. She was so glad they’d never formalized their relationship or moved in together.
Two cardboard boxes (Hurrah! The gluten-free pasta and the earnest bi-ographies!) was all it took to eradicate all evidence of him from her flat, and there was even less for him to do. Telling him had been hard, of course. But not as hard as the sympathetic phone calls and the consolation cards and notes the postman delivered—and which made her feel like a fraud. She didn’t need consolation. Once the boxes were gone, and she didn’t have to look at his hurt face, she felt good, really good. Like when she was running. Free.
She’d gone home to tell Mum. Who had hugged her, hard, and then, pulling back and searching her face, gave a small triumphant cry, and said, “Thank God!”
“I have,” she said now, to Stephen.
“Good. Then we can go out. What are you doing on Friday night?”
Just like that.
When Stephen arrived home that night, it wasn’t the smell of something good cooking on the stove top, or the open bottle of wine, or the soft music playing in the living room that surprised him. It was that Jennifer came to the door when she heard his key turn in the
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lock. That she put her arms around his neck and hugged him tight before he had even closed it behind him. And that she seemed so pleased to see him.
Barbara’s Journal
My Mum
I’ve been writing about being your mum, so I thought I probably ought to write a bit about being my mum’s daughter. It’s all related, isn’t it? Are we the mothers we had ourselves, or do we make a choice to be different? What kind of mothers will you be?
We’re on holiday. A long weekend in Bath. We’re staying in a hotel on Great Pulteney Street—that lovely wide Regency street the BBC always uses in Jane Austen adaptations. We’ve got a bedroom at the front, and I’m sitting at an armchair with a great view of the comings and goings. Mark’s gone to watch rugby. It’s bloody cold, but the sun is streaming in through the window.
We’ve had tea at the Pump Room, and sat on deck chairs in the gardens by the river, and toured the spa (maybe I should have taken the waters—couldn’t have hurt!) and done a bit of shopping. Great shops here. We’ve bought Mark some lovely new suits and ties.
Can’t really get interested in shopping for myself. Bath is full of Americans. They come here from Salisbury and Stonehenge. They think everything is adorable.
We’ve had a lovely time. Isn’t it funny how sometimes a couple of days away can feel like a two-week holiday?
Hannah is on the school ski trip. A week in the French Alps.
We spoke to her last night. They had fresh snow the day before they arrived—by coach, poor things—and the skiing is apparently amazing. She’s beyond blues, now, she claims, and happiest on the reds. How terrifying! Gets that from her father . . . Nothing to do 152 e l i z a b e t h
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with her French ski instructor, she says. She sounds really happy and quite mad. God knows how the teachers who accompany them cope. (Note to Hannah: You said you didn’t want to go. You didn’t want to leave me, you said. In case something happened . . . I made you go. And I’m fine.)